Hello John, Thursday, October 20, 2005, 4:12:36 AM, you wrote: JM> FastString seems to be a misnomer for this library. JM> what it provides is a fast _byte array_ with a lot of useful JM> operations, but it does not provide strings since it does not enforce JM> character encodings in the type system, which would be vital for a real JM> FastString library. In any case, just had to get that off my chest :) may be it can be named ByteArray? and then FastString.Latin1, FastString.UTF8... will use its utilities also, all UTF8 utilities may be placed outside of FastString.UTF8 module, because it can be used for something else btw, FastString is also a bit misnamed. it's really a CompactString. ghc's FastString was named so, imho, just because they provided hashes for fast string comparision -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com